Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

A technology that Adam Back developed is being leveraged in Bitcoin. Austin Hill has been working on zero-knowledge system since before you probably know they existed.

You really want to debate who is the visionary here?

I'd also like to know if you plan to respond to everyone who has thoroughly debunked your claims in the past 3-5 pages

you're a legend in your own mind.

and you're a fraud in your own thread

i'm sure everyone's here to read you then, right?

Me, zerg, Erdogan, molecular, Peter, ZB, NL, notme, even Adrian.

Anyone who hasn't parrotted the same blatantly false assumptions for the last 200 pages despite being proven wrong with multiple people.

Calling someone stupid and telling them they don't get it without a rebuttal doesn't make you correct.Repeating you position and changing topic doesn't make you smart, sure helps people understand your view but is not perfect far from it it requires more reflection and you could challenge it by assuming most of it isn't fact.

Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

A technology that Adam Back developed is being leveraged in Bitcoin. Austin Hill has been working on zero-knowledge system since before you probably know they existed.

You really want to debate who is the visionary here?

I'd also like to know if you plan to respond to everyone who has thoroughly debunked your claims in the past 3-5 pages

you're a legend in your own mind.

and you're a fraud in your own thread

i'm sure everyone's here to read you then, right?

Me, zerg, Erdogan, molecular, Peter, ZB, NL, notme, even Adrian.

Anyone who hasn't parrotted the same blatantly false assumptions for the last 200 pages despite being proven wrong with multiple people.

Calling someone stupid and telling them they don't get it without a rebuttal doesn't make you correct.Repeating you position and changing topic doesn't make you smart, sure helps people understand your view but is not perfect far from it it requires more reflection and you could challenge it by assuming most of it isn't fact.

All I here is noise and a lot of it.

All I see in the last few pages are rebuttal to cypher's claims with facts and well opinionated arguments.

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

A technology that Adam Back developed is being leveraged in Bitcoin. Austin Hill has been working on zero-knowledge system since before you probably know they existed.

You really want to debate who is the visionary here?

I'd also like to know if you plan to respond to everyone who has thoroughly debunked your claims in the past 3-5 pages

you're a legend in your own mind.

and you're a fraud in your own thread

i'm sure everyone's here to read you then, right?

Me, zerg, Erdogan, molecular, Peter, ZB, NL, notme, even Adrian.

Anyone who hasn't parrotted the same blatantly false assumptions for the last 200 pages despite being proven wrong with multiple people.

Calling someone stupid and telling them they don't get it without a rebuttal doesn't make you correct.Repeating you position and changing topic doesn't make you smart, sure helps people understand your view but is not perfect far from it it requires more reflection and you could challenge it by assuming most of it isn't fact.

All I here is noise and a lot of it.

All I see in the last few pages are rebuttal to cypher's claims with facts and well opinionated arguments.

It was the same in 2011 people were board with Bitcoin. The SoV idea wasn't clear then people wanted the do something with there BTC it was amazing after all. People came up with lots of innovative ideas and many tested them out and built new tools. They failed not because of the reasons you think. They succeeded in igniting imagination, they failed for many reasons.

All I see is people starting to get a little board, and some amazing imagination ignition, this time it's way more fantastic it solves previous points of failure. Only it doesn't, it requires we give up the previous protocol and adopt new incentives. And I I may not be able to sit it out.

I've been following your scalability proposal in the Technical Discussion section. You want to see the max block size adjusted based on blockchain feedback (closed loop), whereas Gavin proposes an open-loop solution. One risk with Gavin's solution is that it assumes historical growth rates for internet bandwidth will continue moving forward in time. One risk with your proposal is that it introduces another feedback term into what is surely a nonlinear system (right now the only feedback term is Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment).

By the way, has anyone heard from DeathAndTaxes? I'd love to hear his view on both sidechains and scalability.

me too.

I've just checked his profile and his last login was on October 7th, last post on 29 of August...

Bitcoin is a participatory system which ought to respect the right of self determinism of all of its users - Gregory Maxwell.

Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

That's a very good point, and they still haven't jumped into the fray. Perhaps some old cypherpunks just get tired of fighting the system. Bitcoin needs new blood and sharp minds to build useful tools. I would prefer to see some unity amongst the old vanguard to lead them.

...I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive....

Adam Back, Szabo, and Ray Dillinger (and some others) have all joined the bitcoin community in one way or another in the past year or so. I think Hal was probably spot-on when he noted that "cryptographic graybeards tend to get cynical", and it therefore took the crazy growth that bitcoin had last year to crack that cynicism and cause these guys to get serious about Bitcoin. Ray and Wei Dai have both said that they've been very surprised that Bitcoin took off.

Or maybe most of them had just "moved on to other things".

Regardless, I would indeed prefer if the Blockstream guys personally held a non-trivial quantity of bitcoin. Maybe they do?

Bitcoin is the first monetary system to credibly offer perfect information to all economic participants.Cryptoasset rankings and metrics for investors: http://onchainfx.com

It was the same in 2011 people were board with Bitcoin. The SoV idea wasn't clear then people wanted the do something with there BTC it was amazing after all. People came up with lots of innovative ideas and many tested them out and built new tools. They failed not because of the reasons you think. They succeeded in igniting imagination, they failed for many reasons.

All I see is people starting to get a little board, and some amazing imagination ignition, this time it's way more fantastic it solves previous points of failure. Only it doesn't, it requires we give up the previous protocol and adopt new incentives. And I I may not be able to sit it out.

i still see SC's as a way to break Bitcoin's money function by allowing a gvt sponsored currency to siphon BTC to SC w/o having to pay for them. we need that the price ramps to sustain mining fees and establish Bitcoin as its own global independent currency. forget asset toys. as it is, Wall St is the only one who needs or wants those types of toys in the first place with a minority of Americans invested in these things. even less by foreigners. what ppl should want and need is Sound Money. that is what this project is all about, imo. and the nice thing is anyone who's currently in the Bitcoin system can just sit back, relax, and wait for it to happen. the price charts still tell me we are destined for greatness.

sorry cypher I'm slow, could you please explain to me how the bolded part is possible? (serious question)

as i said, imo, the mere insertion of the spvp into the source code throws the whole notion of Bitcoin as Sound Money out the window b/c it allows the separation of the BTC currency unit from its ultra-secure blockchain ledger. once that's done, all the SC's that have bolted onto Bitcoin can sit back and absorb all the BTC that might be tempted to leave the mainchain. we also would know that there is a for-profit entity out there (Blockstream) who is in position to influence the continued development of these very SC threats to encourage this dynamic for profit generation. is there an additional independent way for a gvt sponsored currency to encourage flight to itself? maybe, use your imagination. i can think of a few.

thanks for the answer.

so the thing that worry you the most is that once a btc is transferred (locked) something bad could happen (a flaw in the math behind the spvp, an 51% attack on the SC) hence the btc will be stuck in a limbo, am I right?

or do you think that the degree of separation introduced by the sidechain is enough to broke the link (peg) between the btc tokens (currency) and the hashing power ("commodity"/"gold")?

Bitcoin is a participatory system which ought to respect the right of self determinism of all of its users - Gregory Maxwell.

...With altcoins we have that fear. But with Sidechains we don't even have to merge popular functions back into the MC, because they use a token scBTC that is pegged to BTC. So if the sidechain becomes popular, it creates demand for BTC to be locked and represented by scBTC which drives up the price of BTC. ...

Maybe I missed discussion of it, but a few thousand pages ago I noted that the bolded part above is not necessarily the case since the exchange rate can be defined by "any deterministic function". To me, that's most of the problem. I used this example before, but say a fantastic sidechain is developed with a 1:1000 exchange rate, and a limit of 100M sidechain coins. Once 100,000 BTC move over, that's it. Demand for the sidecoin no longer feeds back into demand for bitcoin because it's de-facto no longer possible to get sidecoin by locking bitcoin. Am I missing something here?

Assuming I'm not missing anything, then all pegs which are not unlimited 1:1 pegs basically just define separate alt-coins, but alt-coins which can bootstrap off of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the first monetary system to credibly offer perfect information to all economic participants.Cryptoasset rankings and metrics for investors: http://onchainfx.com

Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

That's a very good point, and they still haven't jumped into the fray. Perhaps some old cypherpunks just get tired of fighting the system. Bitcoin needs new blood and sharp minds to build useful tools. I would prefer to see some unity amongst the old vanguard to lead them.

...I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive....

Adam Back, Szabo, and Ray Dillinger (and some others) have all joined the bitcoin community in one way or another in the past year or so. I think Hal was probably spot-on when he noted that "cryptographic graybeards tend to get cynical", and it therefore took the crazy growth that bitcoin had last year to crack that cynicism and cause these guys to get serious about Bitcoin. Ray and Wei Dai have both said that they've been very surprised that Bitcoin took off.

Or maybe most of them had just "moved on to other things".

Regardless, I would indeed prefer if the Blockstream guys personally held a non-trivial quantity of bitcoin. Maybe they do?

Nick Szabo has been into Bitcoin since way back I believe

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

I'm just trying to make incremental progress in my understanding by answering the question "on which ledger is the value stored?" The probability that the 2-way peg is severed is a different discussion.

I think the probability of the 2-way peg being severed is actually central to the definition of "sidechain" vs. "altcoin," and for practical purposes determines investment behavior in the chain.

On one end of the spectrum, if a sidechain's 2-way peg can be severed at the whim of the sidechain devs, it would essentially be an altcoin and would presumably attract about as much investment as altcoins do (not a threat to Bitcoin).

At the other end of the spectrum, if it's mathematically impossible to sever the 2wp, then it is a true sidechain and the value seems to always remain with the Bitcoin ledger (not a threat to Bitcoin, at least not for this reason).

For cases in between, we cannot really call it a true sidechain, and by the same token we cannot really expect substantial portions of the bitcoin holders to just jump over to the sidechain.

In other words, there's a reasoning error to watch out for here: insofar as the value that could be funneled over to the sidechain relies on the certainty that the 2wp will remain, the concern is self-defeating. If there is any shadow of possibility that the 2wp could be broken, it won't attract that many bitcoins - not much more than any altcoin; and if any sidechain does attract a large portion of the bitcoins, it will only be because the 2wp is as certain of a thing in investors' minds as Bitcoin itself is, which is an extremely high bar.

(This does still leave the possibility that the devs could hamstring Bitcoin deliberately to reduce confidence in Bitcoin to bring it in line with confidence in a not completely solid 2wp so that many people would switch despite some uncertainty. However, this is a much smaller argument to be making.)

Great post as usual, ZB. I mostly1 agree: the amount of bitcoins that move to a sidechain will depend, in part, on the credibility of the 2-way peg. And, realistically, it will probably take years for any sidechain to establish enough credibility to attract a significant amount of bitcoins (assuming OP_SIDECHAINPROOFVERIFY is implemented, and even this could take a few years if it happens at all). So I suspect any migration of economic activity away from the Blockchain to be slow and anti-climactic.

Hypothetical Question: If we assume (perhaps unrealistically) that the 2-way peg is unbreakable and if we also assume (again, perhaps unrealistically) that the security of Bitcoin's blockchain remains unchanged with sidechains, what additional risks do sidechains impose? The risks I can see are (a) that sidechains could be used as an "excuse" to avoid addressing Bitcoin's scalability, thereby making the likelihood of an uber sidechain absorbing all the bitcoin more likely (along with the possible shenanigans that such an event might entail), and (b) that it sets a precedent that soft-forking changes to add new "features" are OK.

1I think even if one assumes the 2-way peg is unbreakable, that value is still stored on the sidechain ledger (at least) in the extreme case where the majority of coins and economic activity take place on that sidechain. If everyone moves out of bitcoin and onto the sidechain, then the Blockchain no longer serves its memory function--it becomes superseded by the sidechain's ledger.

We have to assume that the 2-way peg is unbreakable. Same as bitcoin blockchain is unbreakable.

Quote

Bitcoin’s blockheaders can be regarded as an example of a dynamic-membership multi-party signature(or DMMS), which we consider to be of independent interest as a new type of group signature.

spvp is new type of group signature (it can replace ECDSA M-of-N multi-signature)

i still see SC's as a way to break Bitcoin's money function by allowing a gvt sponsored currency to siphon BTC to SC w/o having to pay for them. we need that the price ramps to sustain mining fees and establish Bitcoin as its own global independent currency. forget asset toys. as it is, Wall St is the only one who needs or wants those types of toys in the first place with a minority of Americans invested in these things. even less by foreigners. what ppl should want and need is Sound Money. that is what this project is all about, imo. and the nice thing is anyone who's currently in the Bitcoin system can just sit back, relax, and wait for it to happen. the price charts still tell me we are destined for greatness.

sorry cypher I'm slow, could you please explain to me how the bolded part is possible? (serious question)

as i said, imo, the mere insertion of the spvp into the source code throws the whole notion of Bitcoin as Sound Money out the window b/c it allows the separation of the BTC currency unit from its ultra-secure blockchain ledger. once that's done, all the SC's that have bolted onto Bitcoin can sit back and absorb all the BTC that might be tempted to leave the mainchain. we also would know that there is a for-profit entity out there (Blockstream) who is in position to influence the continued development of these very SC threats to encourage this dynamic for profit generation. is there an additional independent way for a gvt sponsored currency to encourage flight to itself? maybe, use your imagination. i can think of a few.

thanks for the answer.

so the thing that worry you the most is that once a btc is transferred (locked) something bad could happen (a flaw in the math behind the spvp, an 51% attack on the SC) hence the btc will be stuck in a limbo, am I right?

or do you think that the degree of separation introduced by the sidechain is enough to broke the link (peg) between the btc tokens (currency) and the hashing power ("commodity"/"gold")?

i think the spvp breaks the sound money function by allowing the delinking of BTC units from the blockchain. it also encourages the transformation of BTC to speculative SC's that offer assets of all manner (stocks, bonds, etc). these assets do not represent money and are not liquid. Bitcoin will no longer be simply money. it will be a mix of money and assets. much like a Fidelity or eTrade trading platform. as a result, i doubt it ever gets treated as its own currency on Forex. and i doubt it ever gains Sound Money status like gold once had. THAT is a shame b/c that is what i thought this project was all about. replacing fiat money with a digital gold standard.

...With altcoins we have that fear. But with Sidechains we don't even have to merge popular functions back into the MC, because they use a token scBTC that is pegged to BTC. So if the sidechain becomes popular, it creates demand for BTC to be locked and represented by scBTC which drives up the price of BTC. ...

Maybe I missed discussion of it, but a few thousand pages ago I noted that the bolded part above is not necessarily the case since the exchange rate can be defined by "any deterministic function". To me, that's most of the problem. I used this example before, but say a fantastic sidechain is developed with a 1:1000 exchange rate, and a limit of 100M sidechain coins. Once 100,000 BTC move over, that's it. Demand for the sidecoin no longer feeds back into demand for bitcoin because it's de-facto no longer possible to get sidecoin by locking bitcoin. Am I missing something here?

Assuming I'm not missing anything, then all pegs which are not unlimited 1:1 pegs basically just define separate alt-coins, but alt-coins which can bootstrap off of bitcoin.

It's possible, but there is no point to it because the majority of people are looking to preserve the value of their investment.

For this reason, I will create fantastic sidechain 2.0 but without a cap and a 1:1 exchange rate and yours will be made irrelevant. No one is looking to inflate the value of their wealth.

"I believe this will be the ultimate fate of Bitcoin, to be the "high-powered money" that serves as a reserve currency for banks that issue their own digital cash." Hal Finney, Dec. 2010

Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

That's a very good point, and they still haven't jumped into the fray. Perhaps some old cypherpunks just get tired of fighting the system. Bitcoin needs new blood and sharp minds to build useful tools. I would prefer to see some unity amongst the old vanguard to lead them.

...I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive....

Adam Back, Szabo, and Ray Dillinger (and some others) have all joined the bitcoin community in one way or another in the past year or so. I think Hal was probably spot-on when he noted that "cryptographic graybeards tend to get cynical", and it therefore took the crazy growth that bitcoin had last year to crack that cynicism and cause these guys to get serious about Bitcoin. Ray and Wei Dai have both said that they've been very surprised that Bitcoin took off.

Or maybe most of them had just "moved on to other things".

Regardless, I would indeed prefer if the Blockstream guys personally held a non-trivial quantity of bitcoin. Maybe they do?

Nick Szabo has been into Bitcoin since way back I believe

As far I know, Szabo first publicly wrote about bitcoin in 2011 (or Nov 1st 2008 ), but he didn't really jump in to the community until his twitter presence recently (to my knowledge, anyways).

...With altcoins we have that fear. But with Sidechains we don't even have to merge popular functions back into the MC, because they use a token scBTC that is pegged to BTC. So if the sidechain becomes popular, it creates demand for BTC to be locked and represented by scBTC which drives up the price of BTC. ...

Maybe I missed discussion of it, but a few thousand pages ago I noted that the bolded part above is not necessarily the case since the exchange rate can be defined by "any deterministic function". To me, that's most of the problem. I used this example before, but say a fantastic sidechain is developed with a 1:1000 exchange rate, and a limit of 100M sidechain coins. Once 100,000 BTC move over, that's it. Demand for the sidecoin no longer feeds back into demand for bitcoin because it's de-facto no longer possible to get sidecoin by locking bitcoin. Am I missing something here?

Assuming I'm not missing anything, then all pegs which are not unlimited 1:1 pegs basically just define separate alt-coins, but alt-coins which can bootstrap off of bitcoin.

It's possible, but there is no point to it because the majority of people are looking to preserve the value of their investment.

i still see SC's as a way to break Bitcoin's money function by allowing a gvt sponsored currency to siphon BTC to SC w/o having to pay for them. we need that the price ramps to sustain mining fees and establish Bitcoin as its own global independent currency. forget asset toys. as it is, Wall St is the only one who needs or wants those types of toys in the first place with a minority of Americans invested in these things. even less by foreigners. what ppl should want and need is Sound Money. that is what this project is all about, imo. and the nice thing is anyone who's currently in the Bitcoin system can just sit back, relax, and wait for it to happen. the price charts still tell me we are destined for greatness.

sorry cypher I'm slow, could you please explain to me how the bolded part is possible? (serious question)

as i said, imo, the mere insertion of the spvp into the source code throws the whole notion of Bitcoin as Sound Money out the window b/c it allows the separation of the BTC currency unit from its ultra-secure blockchain ledger. once that's done, all the SC's that have bolted onto Bitcoin can sit back and absorb all the BTC that might be tempted to leave the mainchain. we also would know that there is a for-profit entity out there (Blockstream) who is in position to influence the continued development of these very SC threats to encourage this dynamic for profit generation. is there an additional independent way for a gvt sponsored currency to encourage flight to itself? maybe, use your imagination. i can think of a few.

thanks for the answer.

so the thing that worry you the most is that once a btc is transferred (locked) something bad could happen (a flaw in the math behind the spvp, an 51% attack on the SC) hence the btc will be stuck in a limbo, am I right?

or do you think that the degree of separation introduced by the sidechain is enough to broke the link (peg) between the btc tokens (currency) and the hashing power ("commodity"/"gold")?

i think the spvp breaks the sound money function by allowing the delinking of BTC units from the blockchain. it also encourages the transformation of BTC to speculative SC's that offer assets of all manner (stocks, bonds, etc). these assets do not represent money and are not liquid. Bitcoin will no longer be simply money. it will be a mix of money and assets. much like a Fidelity or eTrade trading platform. as a result, i doubt it ever gets treated as its own currency on Forex. and i doubt it ever gains Sound Money status like gold once had. THAT is a shame b/c that is what i thought this project was all about. replacing fiat money with a digital gold standard.

Off-ramps are a reality of Bitcoin and exist already in numerous forms. We absolutely need off-ramps to scale the system and make it possible to reach mainstream adoption. For those of us who understand the implications, it is quite clear that sidechains are potentially the most secure and natural off-ramp possible. It offers the unique chance to preserve the integrity of the ledger and protect the Sound Money aspect of Bitcoin on the protocol level.

so what is wrong with using SC's to incorporate all those assets? it breaks the Sound Money function.

This comment in itself is so naive and ignorant of our present reality I'm not even sure where to begin... The desire to represent these assets in BTC and the demand for such applications has been crystal clear for everyone who has been paying attention. It is the sole reason why Bitcoin 2.0 projects exist. The problem with most Bitcoin 2.0 projects is that they introduce in the majority of cases an additional third-party that demands an increased level of trust. These third-parties are by all chances, the most dangerous risk to the Sound Money function.

I'm just trying to make incremental progress in my understanding by answering the question "on which ledger is the value stored?" The probability that the 2-way peg is severed is a different discussion.

I think the probability of the 2-way peg being severed is actually central to the definition of "sidechain" vs. "altcoin," and for practical purposes determines investment behavior in the chain.

On one end of the spectrum, if a sidechain's 2-way peg can be severed at the whim of the sidechain devs, it would essentially be an altcoin and would presumably attract about as much investment as altcoins do (not a threat to Bitcoin).

At the other end of the spectrum, if it's mathematically impossible to sever the 2wp, then it is a true sidechain and the value seems to always remain with the Bitcoin ledger (not a threat to Bitcoin, at least not for this reason).

For cases in between, we cannot really call it a true sidechain, and by the same token we cannot really expect substantial portions of the bitcoin holders to just jump over to the sidechain.

In other words, there's a reasoning error to watch out for here: insofar as the value that could be funneled over to the sidechain relies on the certainty that the 2wp will remain, the concern is self-defeating. If there is any shadow of possibility that the 2wp could be broken, it won't attract that many bitcoins - not much more than any altcoin; and if any sidechain does attract a large portion of the bitcoins, it will only be because the 2wp is as certain of a thing in investors' minds as Bitcoin itself is, which is an extremely high bar.

(This does still leave the possibility that the devs could hamstring Bitcoin deliberately to reduce confidence in Bitcoin to bring it in line with confidence in a not completely solid 2wp so that many people would switch despite some uncertainty. However, this is a much smaller argument to be making.)

Great post as usual, ZB. I mostly1 agree: the amount of bitcoins that move to a sidechain will depend, in part, on the credibility of the 2-way peg. And, realistically, it will probably take years for any sidechain to establish enough credibility to attract a significant amount of bitcoins (assuming OP_SIDECHAINPROOFVERIFY is implemented, and even this could take a few years if it happens at all). So I suspect any migration of economic activity away from the Blockchain to be slow and anti-climactic.

Hypothetical Question: If we assume (perhaps unrealistically) that the 2-way peg is unbreakable and if we also assume (again, perhaps unrealistically) that the security of Bitcoin's blockchain remains unchanged with sidechains, what additional risks do sidechains impose? The risks I can see are (a) that sidechains could be used as an "excuse" to avoid addressing Bitcoin's scalability, thereby making the likelihood of an uber sidechain absorbing all the bitcoin more likely (along with the possible shenanigans that such an event might entail), and (b) that it sets a precedent that soft-forking changes to add new "features" are OK.

1I think even if one assumes the 2-way peg is unbreakable, that value is still stored on the sidechain ledger (at least) in the extreme case where the majority of coins and economic activity take place on that sidechain. If everyone moves out of bitcoin and onto the sidechain, then the Blockchain no longer serves its memory function--it becomes superseded by the sidechain's ledger.

We have to assume that the 2-way peg is unbreakable. Same as bitcoin blockchain is unbreakable.

Quote

Bitcoin’s blockheaders can be regarded as an example of a dynamic-membership multi-party signature(or DMMS), which we consider to be of independent interest as a new type of group signature.

spvp is new type of group signature (it can replace ECDSA M-of-N multi-signature)

...With altcoins we have that fear. But with Sidechains we don't even have to merge popular functions back into the MC, because they use a token scBTC that is pegged to BTC. So if the sidechain becomes popular, it creates demand for BTC to be locked and represented by scBTC which drives up the price of BTC. ...

Maybe I missed discussion of it, but a few thousand pages ago I noted that the bolded part above is not necessarily the case since the exchange rate can be defined by "any deterministic function". To me, that's most of the problem. I used this example before, but say a fantastic sidechain is developed with a 1:1000 exchange rate, and a limit of 100M sidechain coins. Once 100,000 BTC move over, that's it. Demand for the sidecoin no longer feeds back into demand for bitcoin because it's de-facto no longer possible to get sidecoin by locking bitcoin. Am I missing something here?

Assuming I'm not missing anything, then all pegs which are not unlimited 1:1 pegs basically just define separate alt-coins, but alt-coins which can bootstrap off of bitcoin.

It's possible, but there is no point to it because the majority of people are looking to preserve the value of their investment.

Unlike most detractors in here, Adam Back and Austin Hill's track record speak for themselves.

You're definitely new here, or else you'd recognize that exact same argument has been run by each and every single long-con scammer and ponzi operator going back to Pirate@40 until the present day.

Are you getting paid to discredit Blockstream?

well, another way to look at them is that they both admittedly missed the Bitcoin train in the beginning and only came around in 2013. how visionary is that?

A technology that Adam Back developed is being leveraged in Bitcoin. Austin Hill has been working on zero-knowledge system since before you probably know they existed.

You really want to debate who is the visionary here?

I'd also like to know if you plan to respond to everyone who has thoroughly debunked your claims in the past 3-5 pages

you're a legend in your own mind.

and you're a fraud in your own thread

i'm sure everyone's here to read you then, right?

Me, zerg, Erdogan, molecular, Peter, ZB, NL, notme, even Adrian.

Anyone who hasn't parrotted the same blatantly false assumptions for the last 200 pages despite being proven wrong multiple time by multiple people.

I am totally uninterested in the respectability of the people behind blockstream, the protocol they invent should be able to stand on its own legs. Even satoshi could be a total jerk for all I care. I depend on his whitepaper and the system as implemented.